For the past few years (2011, 2012 and 2013), I’ve had the pleasure of sharing two “top 10” lists of the most consulted cases on CanLII with Slaw readers. One list is of all cases consulted and the other pertains only to consultations of cases decided within the year.

I’m very pleased to present the results for 2014.

I invite readers to weigh in with their thoughts on the significance of any case appearing on either list.

If you’re curious, but don’t have time to read the full case, or if you want to dig deeper into the implications of these cases, summaries and commentaries for nearly all of them are available on CanLII Connects.

Background and miscellanea:

CanLII’s operations have been continuously funded by Canada’s provincial and territorial law societies (and by extension, Canada’s lawyers and notaries) since 2000 to allow legal professionals and the public to access primary legal information at no direct cost. Weekday traffic to the site consistently exceeds 30,000 daily visits and total visits for 2014 will approach 9.5 million.

Monthly unique visitors are routinely over 230,000, a number that indicates extensive site use by individuals outside the legal profession. Consequently, the cases cracking the top ten lists might be considered as representing a mix of public interest and legal significance.

A “view” or “consultation” of a document is measured as the interaction of an individual with the case URL. Mere appearance of a case in a list of search results will not constitute a view, but opening it to inspect it will. Similarly, where a user subscribes to RSS feeds and a case appears in the list, the case view does not take place until it is opened.

Results above aggregate views for a given decision across formats (PDF or HTML) and across French and English.

Certain decisions were excluded from consideration where consultation counts appeared to be artificially inflated by automated links or other means that suggested page views were generated by automated process and not initiated at the request of an individual user.

Standings measured as of December 15th. If significant shifts occur over the final few weeks of the year, I will provide an update in the comments.